The One Unchanging Thing Is I
by bethemoon
Summary: She is always moving on. Part two of my Renesmee's future 'verse. Sequel to Going South. PG-13, implied violence/death.


**Title**: The One Unchanging Thing Is I**  
Character**: Renesmee Cullen**  
Rating**: PG-13**  
Warnings**: Unexplicit violence/murder.**  
When**: After Breaking Dawn.**  
Summary**: She is always moving on.**  
Disclaimer**: The Twilight books are not mine, and I am thankful.**  
Author's Note**: Continuation to Going South. Title comes from White Fog by Sara Teasdale. This 'verse may still not be done, because I really, really want to see her with the Volturi sometime, and also there's so much from her years at Harvard I never said.

*

She goes slow at first, because she doesn't want to be anything but normal, slides in and out of towns like water, there and then gone. She stands by the side of the road patiently, waiting for someone to pick her up, and when they do she fills the silence slowly too, small conversations, questions like "How are you?" and "And your family?", things she's only lately learned to ask.

She eats waffles covered with strawberries and whipped cream for breakfast at roadside diners and licks blood off of her lips at night.

You were wrong, she writes to her father. Killing a murderer does not make you as bad as them. You were wrong. But she never mails the letter. He would not believe her, and she does not seek his approval anymore.

*

She walks down the highways in the middle of Arizona, and knows that she could move faster if she wanted to.

It is peaceful in the summer sun.

*

Heraclitus had said, _The only constant is change_.

Sometimes she just sits in a field and watches it shift around her, changing as she never will.

*

The simple fact of the matter is, she should not exist. Renesmee Cullen is an anomaly in time and space, one of a very few such. It is why she became Mary Blake, who can walk down the highway in the sunlight without worry (who will note her slight shimmer from the speeding cars passing by?), who can kiss boys at bars, who carries the proof of her existence in the documents in her bag and in her own head. Who can laugh at the idea of a Destiny (she has escaped) and work in dirty gas stations and not worry about what to tell people.

She won't be here long anyway.

"Just travelling," she tells people who ask.

She is always moving on.

*

These days, she walks more often than she hitches lifts. It is slower and calmer, a way to keep track of the days passing and the miles she walks.

*

Heraclitus also said _You cannot step twice in the same river_.

*

Charlie does not look surprised when he opens the door, just smiles soft and says, "Nice to see you, kid," and lets her walk past him.

They cook dinner together, fried fish and salad, and Mary-who-was-Renesmee asks if she can dye her hair in the sink.

"I'm thinking back to red," she says, short peroxide blonde hair flopping into her face, and he smiles, warm like the sun and so human she feels something like jealousy.

"I'm sure it'll look fantastic," he says. "Want to go fishing with me tomorrow?" She says yes, of course I do, and watches basketball with him, head on his shoulder.

There is gray in his hair.

*

_When is death not within ourselves_? Heraclitus had asked, thousands of years ago.

*

"They love you, you know," he says. "They're your parents."

She has watched other people's parents, listened to others stories about their parents. Parents pick you up when you fall down.

She has never fallen down.

"Yeah, I know," she says for lack of anything else to say.

Before she walks out into the forest, he hugs her and gives her a slip of paper with their phone number.

"You should let them know you're okay sometime," he says, and then makes her take half the fish they caught together. "Yours fair and square," he says. And, "I'll be here whenever you want to drop by or call." And, "Have fun, kid."

"Thanks," she says, and "I will," and moves steady and slow like water, one foot in front of the other, drip drip drip, keeps moving but doesn't leave him behind.

*

"Hey mom," she says from a payphone in California.

*

She wants to tell her mother about girl things, about kissing boys in bars and first dates, but her mother believes in true love and imprinting, so she doesn't.

"How is everyone?" she asks instead, and deflects their questions about her.

*

_The road up and the road down are one and the same_. Heraclitus again, and she thinks he must never have gone up a hill and then down the other side, slow in the afternoon sun, steps calm and sure heading towards nowhere.


End file.
